Animal Poaching: Geography

In an effort to assist visitors to this site, I have broken down that extremely long, tedious list of tag categories found on the Animal Poaching News page; they are broken down into continental, regional, and, in the case of Canada and the US, into provincial and statewide divisions (if you are perhaps interested in discovering why there are so many tag categories on that page--as well as the ongoing problems I'm having with those categories--please see my comments in "Sticky Notes Part 1" and "Sticky Notes Part 2"). Rather than clutter this page with another vast litany of places, you will find only large, continental-level listings (plus the Middle East which, although not synonymous with a continent, falls between the usual continental divisions, and is typically thought of as a separate, cohesive unit [even though that's hardly the case\, and Australasia which, excluding Australia, is comprised of islands of varying sizes and populations). If you click on one of these links below, you'll be taken to pages where a further breakdown for those specific geographic entities can be found (i.e., regional-levels groupings and individual countries). Be ever aware, though, that these groupings--and the additional location groupings found in the pages these links take you to--are for classification purposes only. Cultural, political, and physical boundaries do not (necessarily) correspond with animal ecozones or ecotypes or climates, which affect where specific animals reside. Nor do they correspond with animal migration patterns that reflect changing climate patterns and human attempts to capture and/or kill animals; the animals change their locations due to these and other prevailing factors. As such, many of these geographic categories are indeed vague in terms of their actual boundaries, and there is a good deal of overlap in some parts of the world. For that reason, you will find that certain places can be found under more than one geographic category. So, where categories extend beyond their recognized, physical or political boundaries, I have included, and have labeled, such "overlapping" places within each category as "proximate" members of that particular category.

NB: This applies to the 2009-2013 Animal Poaching News page only, and it does NOT apply to the subsequent (2014 or later postings), which are found on the Animal Poaching News, 2014 page, and which are broken down into far fewer and different categories. Note also that not every single island in the world is found in the following pages. Many, very tiny, sparsely-populated, overseas territories and dependencies exist--some of them in the middle of oceans far removed from any particular continent or regional grouping. It would not be "cost-effective" (for me) to identify and include such places on this site (not because they're not important, but because available animal poaching data for those places are difficult to come by, and most of the poaching on and around small islands involves fishing, which would make such postings highly redundant); and poaching news accounts for many such locales are not the most reliable (especially in Australasia). Also, some broad topics--like Latin America, Europe, Middle East--that cover a large area and not a specific country--are instead found in the "Topics" area of the site, most likely on the Themes: Part 1 page.